The controversial Numes Memo with progressive views by The Nation, The Intercept, Consortium News, AntiMedia and the Real News Network

Yesterday, February 2, 2018, a controversial memo was released regarding Russian spying with implications for the Democrats and what Ray McGovern calls the FBI/CIA/NSA deep state. Three articles with different spins and viewpoints are posted here: John Nichols in The Nation, Alex Emmons and Trevor Aaronson of The Intercept, and Ray McGovern of Consortium News, with a link to related commentary by Tyler Durden of The AntiMedia.

Max Blumenthal and Ex-FBI Agent Coleen Rowley on the Nunes Memo: The just-released Nunes memo alleges surveillance abuses by the FBI and Justice Department in their handling of the Trump-Russia probe. Former FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley and award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal weigh in. (Added February 3, 2018)

Real News Network, February 2, 2018 (Video)

The Speaker of the House has abandoned his duty to defend the authority of the House in order to serve as an agent of the president.

Asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 if the delegates had created a republic or a monarchy, Benjamin Franklin is reported to have replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Paul Ryan has abandoned the effort to keep it.

At the heart of the US Constitution is a system of checks and balances that was established primarily to guard against the concentration of power in an executive branch that might tend toward royalism. The founders of the American experiment wanted to prevent a repeat of the monarchical abuses of King George III, against which their constituents had risen in revolution.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” warned James Madison, the essential author of the Constitution, who explained, “The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.”

What Madison asserted in the late 1780s remains true to this day: For the system of checks and balances to function, the leaders charged with responsibility for the various branches of government must zealously defend the authority of the branches they lead. They cannot allow one branch to become the extension of another.

This is the basic duty that House Speaker Paul Ryanrejected when he chose to make the legislative chamber subservient to President Trump’s lawless executive branch. Ryan’s abandonment of the Constitution began long ago. But it culminated with the speaker’s decision to support Friday’s release of a partisan memo produced by disgraced House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) to discredit law-enforcement agencies that have organized and supported inquiries into Trump-campaign and Trump-administration wrongdoing.

“Discrediting law enforcement is the memo’s transparent purpose and why it has been embraced by President Trump,” argued a Washington Posteditorial that condemned Ryan’s choice. “Written mainly by the staff of Devin Nunes (R-CA), the loose-cannon chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the memo reportedly makes the case that the FBI abused spying authorities as it sought permission to surveil a former Trump adviser,” noted the Post. “The Justice Department called its potential release, which Mr. Trump reportedly intends to approve, ‘extraordinarily reckless.’ The FBI released its own startling public statement citing ‘grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.’ Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wrote in a Post op-ed that the Nunes memo ‘cherry-picks facts, ignores others and smears the FBI and the Justice Department.’”

The Post’s editorial appeared just before the release of the memo. But the concerns it expressed were confirmed by the document, which makes over-the-top and highly speculative allegations about how the inquiry into the Trump team’s Russia ties has been conducted, and especially about how FISA warrants were obtained, but fails to present an even minimally credible case that the inquiry is unnecessary or inappropriate.

That memo is so thin in content and character that it adds weight to the argument made by the Post with a headline that read: “Paul Ryanis tarnishing the House.”

The speaker’s embrace of Nunes and his memo has dishonored the chamber that he, above all others, is duty bound to defend.

But that is the least of the sins against the American experiment committed by Ryan in collaboration with Nunes. Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley, a key Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, aptly describes Ryan and Nunes as “co-conspirators” in doing the bidding of a president who has “freaked out” over special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Ryan’s dereliction of duty is the more serious matter, as it betrays the most fundamental tenets of the Constitution. When the speaker chose to facilitate this bungling effort by Nunes to smear the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice on Trump’s behalf, the Wisconsin Republican signaled a willingness to make the House of Representatives an appendage of the White House.

In so doing, Ryan abandoned the solemn oath he swore “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

Paul Ryan is not supporting the Constitution. He is shredding it. It is grotesque for the speaker to claim that he is aiding and abetting Nunes because “that brings us accountability, that brings us transparency, that helps us clean up any problem we have with [the Justice Department] and FBI”—as Ryan did Thursday in a crudely defensive and wildly dishonest attempt to deny his true intentions.

Make no mistake: Paul Ryan has zero interest in accountability, transparency, or cleaning up problems with law-enforcement agencies and the investigative process. He has shown no interest in legitimate and necessary oversight of intelligence agencies. He has never been identified with the cause of civil liberties or with the defense of privacy rights.

What Paul Ryan has been identified with is extreme partisanship and with the determination of congressional Republicans to defend Donald Trump—even if that defense comes at the cost of a system of checks and balances that was established 231 years ago to guard against precisely the abuses that are now occurring.

Nunes Memo Accidentally Confirms the Legitimacy of the FBI’s Investigation

Even if Steele’s work was purely at the behest of the Democratic Party, however, that would not historically exclude it from being used as evidence in court. The context missing from the memo is that the FBI routinely deals in information coming from biased sources.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., walks away after speaking to reporters after a meeting at the White House March 22, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

DESPITE STRONG OBJECTIONS from the Justice Department, House Republicans released a four-page memo on Friday challenging the “legitimacy and legality” of the FBI’s surveillance of Carter Page, a former adviser to the Trump campaign suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence.

The memo, generated by staffers of House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, R-Calif., confirms that the FBI sought authorization under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to intercept Page’s communications. The FBI submitted the FISA application in October 2016, after Page had left the Trump campaign, by establishing probable cause to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Page was acting as an “agent” of Russia. The Nunes memo also reports that FISA surveillance of Page was subsequently renewed three times.

The central claim of the memo is that the FISA surveillance applications relied on a controversial dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele, whose raw intelligence reports claimed that Trump campaign officials had met with Russians and that Russian intelligence had information sufficient to blackmail Donald Trump. Steele was a Russia expert for MI6 and had provided credible information to the FBI in the past.

According to the Nunes memo, the FBI received three 90-day extensions to monitor Page’s communications under FISA authority.

The Nunes memo does not say Steele’s dossier was the only piece of information used to establish probable cause that Page was acting as a foreign agent. Indeed, when FBI agents submit a FISA application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, they use information from multiple sources, according to current and former FBI officials.

What’s more, the same information is not used over and over to extend surveillance under FISA. Instead, every 90 days, the FBI, as a matter of practice, shows evidence to the court that agents are obtaining foreign intelligence information through the surveillance that is in line with the initial FISA application.

According to the Nunes memo, the FBI received three 90-day extensions to monitor Page’s communications under FISA authority. This would have required the FBI to show Justice Department lawyers and the FISA court judge that Page’s intercepted communications included relevant foreign intelligence information. In fact, according to the memo, two Trump appointees at the Justice Department — Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Dana Boente, who served as acting attorney general after Trump fired Sally Yates — reviewed this information and signed off on submissions to the FISA court.

What’s more, it’s highly doubtful that the FISA court judge would not have known about Steele by the time Page’s surveillance came up for renewal, as the Nunes memo suggests. BuzzFeed published Steele’s dossier in full in January 2017.

“Steele was out there. He was in the press at this time,” said Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “It’s ridiculous to believe that the judge had no idea who Steele was as this is being renewed over and over again.”

According to reports from journalists, unnamed Democrats on the committee have already begun to dispute the memo’s claim that the Steele dossier was an “essential part” of the evidentiary basis for the warrant applications.

But even if the dossier was a key part of the initial investigation, it wouldn’t have helped the FBI renew its warrant on three subsequent occasions.

THE MEMO ARGUES that the FBI’s process was not a good-faith attempt to investigate Russian influence; rather, the memo says, it was a politically motivated operation to spy on someone affiliated with the Trump campaign.

The memo claims that Steele’s dossier is not reliable because an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, hired Steele after receiving payments from a law firm connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Fusion GPS’s clients for its Trump research, however, were not limited to partisan Democratic Party concerns: The firm began its research into Trump at the behest of the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing news website that initially opposed Trump’s insurgent campaign.

Nunes’s memo also alleges another funding source for Steele: the document states that he was not only paid for his work by Fusion GPS, but also by the FBI. That means the Trump opposition work was funded by partisans of both parties as well as a federal bureaucracy.

The context missing from the memo is that the FBI routinely
deals in information coming from biased sources.

Even if Steele’s work was purely at the behest of the Democratic Party, however, that would not historically exclude it from being used as evidence in court. The context missing from the memo is that the FBI routinely deals in information coming from biased sources. FBI informants, who number more than 15,000 today, are often motivated by revenge, money, or idealism, among other drivers. The FBI collects relevant information, no matter the source, and then exerts extensive effort to corroborate the information — for example, by seeking a wiretap of a campaign official thought to be conspiring with a foreign government.

U.S. government officials have for years suspected that Page, an energy investor who has done business in Russia, had connections to Russian intelligence. According to the New York Times, the FBI became aware of him as early as 2013, when agents learned that he was passing documents about the energy business to a Russian intelligence agent. The FBI interviewed Page at the time, but concluded he had done so unwittingly, passing the documents to a man he thought was a businessman instead of a spy. The FBI again turned its attention to Page after he traveled to Moscow in the summer of 2016.

The Nunes memo is widely seen as an attempt to challenge the credibility of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. After reviewing the memo, but before it was released, the FBI issued a statement saying it had “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impacted the memo’s accuracy.”

Trump took to Twitter on Friday morning and said the FBI and Justice Department “politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans.” The White House later released a statement saying the memo raises “serious concerns about the integrity of decisions made at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the FBI.”

Despite rhetoric that could help to undermine Mueller’s investigation, the Nunes memo specifically says that George Papadopoulos sparked the counterintelligence investigation that ultimately led to the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, the firing of FBI Director James Comey, and the appointment of Mueller as special counsel. Papadopoulos, a former Trump foreign policy advisor, pleaded guilty in October to making false statements to the FBI.

Even if the controversial Steele dossier and the FISA surveillance of Page had sparked the special counsel’s inquiry, this would not be the first time that politically motivated information led to a special counsel investigation. Conservative businessman Richard Mellon Scaife gave $2 million to the American Spectator in the early 1990s to investigate President Bill Clinton’s real estate investments and sexual harassment claims against him. Information from the reporting Scaife funded led in part the appointment of Kenneth Starr to investigate Clinton.

Throughout the Nunes memo, Republicans appeal to the rhetoric of civil libertarians, who have long argued that the standards and protections of the FISA court are insufficient. Critics have pointed to the fact that the court operates in secrecy and relies on a body of hidden laws and precedents. The FISA court is also non-adversarial, as the government is typically the only party represented, although Congress passed a law in 2015 that allows the court to appoint outside counsel.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a critic of the FISA court’s lack of transparency, charged that Nunes was wrapping a political argument in claims of civil liberties abuse. “The completeness and accuracy of government representations to the FISA court are longstanding concerns,” Christopher Anders, deputy director of ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement. “The Nunes memo makes serious charges of FBI and Justice Department misconduct in obtaining a warrant to surveil an American citizen, but on its own, does not contain the facts needed to substantiate its charges.”

Anders added:

“Rather than one side or the other cherry-picking facts, all Americans deserve to see all of the facts, including both the minority report and the underlying documents. The goal should be more transparency, not less, particularly when a congressional committee chairman makes serious charges of abuse but does not provide the facts to either prove the charges or allow Americans to make up our own minds.”

Exclusive: The newly released “Nunes Memo” reveals felony wrongdoing by top members of the FBI and DOJ for misrepresenting evidence to obtain a FISA warrant and may implicate other intelligence officials, writes Ray McGovern.

Nunes Memo Reports Crimes at Top of FBI & DOJ

The long-awaited House Intelligence Committee report made public today identifies current and former top officials of the FBI and the Department of Justice as guilty of the felony of misrepresenting evidence required to obtain a court warrant before surveilling American citizens. The target was candidate Donald Trump’s adviser Carter Page.

Former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

The main points of what is widely known as the “Nunes Memo,” after the House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), have been nicely summarized by blogger Publius Tacitus, who noted that the following very senior officials are now liable for contempt-of-court charges; namely, the current and former members of the FBI and the Department of Justice who signed off on fraudulent applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court: James Comey, Andy McCabe, Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rob Rosenstein. The following is Publius Tacitus’s summary of the main points:

The dubious but celebrated Steele Dossier played a critical role in obtaining approval from the FISA court to carry out surveillance of Carter Page according to former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe.

Christopher Steele was getting paid by the DNC and the FBI for the same information.

No one at the FBI or the DOJ disclosed to the court that the Steele dossier was paid for by an opposition political campaign.

The first FISA warrant was obtained on October 21, 2016 based on a story written by Michael Isikoff for Yahoo News based on information he received directly from Christopher Steele — the FBI did not disclose in the FISA application that Steele was the original source of the information.

Christopher Steele was a long-standing FBI “source” but was terminated as a source after telling Mother Jones reporter David Corn that he had a relationship with the FBI.

The FBI signers of the FISA applications/renewals were James Comey (three times) and Andrew McCabe.

The DOJ signers of the FISA applications/renewals were Sally Yates, Dana Boente and Rod Rosenstein.

Even after Steele was terminated by the FBI, he remained in contact with Deputy Attorney General Bruce Our, whose wife worked for FUSION GPS, a contractor that was deeply involved with the Steele dossier.

From what Michael Isikoff reported in September 2016 it appears that the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence (as well as the FBI) are implicated in spreading the disinformation about Trump and Russia. Isikoff wrote:

“U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials — including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue. […]

“But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News.”

Who were the “intelligence officials” briefing the select members of the House and Senate? That will be one of the next shoes to drop. We are likely to learn in the coming days that John Brennan and Jim Clapper were also trying to help the FBI build a fallacious case against Trump, adds Tacitus.

Indeed, Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has already indicated that his disclosures in the Nunes Memo represent just “one piece of a probably much larger mosaic of what went on.”

The Media Will Determine What Comes Next

As for Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, it is now abundantly clear why he went to ridiculous lengths, as did the entire Democratic congressional leadership, to block or impugn the House Intelligence Committee report.

Until the mid-December revelations of the text messages between FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page turned Russia-gate into FBI/DOJ-gate, Schiff had been riding high, often hiding behind what he said “he could not tell” the rest of us.

With the media, including what used to be the progressive media, fully supporting the likes of Adam Schiff, and the FBI/CIA/NSA deep state likely to pull out all the stops, the die is now cast. We are in for a highly interesting time over the next months.

Ray McGovern works with the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

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